As a current dis-satisfied minraven customer I decided to try express hosting with a non ubb personal site.Elected the cheap shared hosting plan.So far all I can say is wow!Tom is a dream to work with.All I did was give him my login at mindraven.Not cpanel but the client login.He took care of everything.Downloaded backups, uploaded same and it was working in a matter of less than a hour.Also pointed the domain to the new servers.Then offered to handle domain name transfer which is in the process.

I did install ubb afterwards just to test compatibility and it worked flawless.

The only items I noticed was:1. Captcha did appear to build a little slow. Possibly just a cache issue.2. Until you take the leap there is very little documentation on what to do or what is needed.But Tom jumped in and took care of everything.

He was also very in tune with ubb even thought it was not used on this site. But the initial email was right on track on what I need to do to move the site. close the board etc.My first email received after signup:

Quote

The next step in the process is to get the current username and password for your account at Mindraven. Once we have that information we can get ready to perform the migration from Mindraven to our hosting servers. The process goes like this:

1) You login to the admin section of the UBB and put your bulletin board into maintenance mode.2) You give us the go ahead and we will migrate your account from Mindraven (web, email, database, etc - everything will remain the same) to our hosting platform.3) We update your DNS at the Mindraven servers to point to your new IP.4) We update the nameservers with your registrar to point to our nameservers5) On the new server instance you can set the UBB install to be online again (leaving the old UBB in maintenance mode). This will help prevent any posts from being made to the old server.

If you want, I can give you a call, or you can give me a call (I am in the office today working on some other things). 866-656-2229 x2001 - the message says we are closed, but you can dial my extension anyways and reach me.

Also followup was great.I am counting at least 10 emails on status and updates and there was not one hiccup.

And BTW, Tom speaks english. LOL

Don't loose this guy Brooks.

Blue Man GroupThere is no such thing as stupid questions. Just stupid answers

Okay I am just on the verge of moving another site from Mindraven.I have been down at least all afternoon.And mindraven has been down too so I can't even get any updates on status.That is enough for me.

Blue Man GroupThere is no such thing as stupid questions. Just stupid answers

Well I finally moved my last site from Mindraven to express.Again it was flawless.I did provide all my login info but Tom took care of all of it. Mysql,Files and pointing the domain names to the new dns server.

All I did was go to bed wake up in the morning and it was done.

Blue Man GroupThere is no such thing as stupid questions. Just stupid answers

Just in case you're wondering what I'm talking about and to save explanations later.

I was offered free hosting by Mindraven at the beginning of January, just after I'd paid for my January hosting so I decided to Close my account with eXpress Hosting, as soon as I said I was moving the files for my site were deleted from the server, luckily I had managed to get everything transferred over so didn't lose anything and THEN was asked to pay for February as my account had not been closed as requested BUT the files had been deleted so, hmmmmm!

Anyway, to cut a long story short, yes eXpress Hosting ARE very helpful, and the love fest on here for them is all well and good but they are certainly not the second-coming of God!

And really, when it comes down to it, neither Mindraven NOR eXpress Hosting are at fault in any of this, the person to blame is Rick Baker, who shat on his customers from a great height...the two hosting providers AND UBBSystems are dealing with the flak created by Rick (despite a few mess ups by Mindraven themselves mind you).

Just as a point of clarification to Stephen's comments, yes we certainly did remove his site, but only after we had verified that the site was operational on Mindraven's servers.

It is company policy to remove a cancelled account immediately upon cancellation unless directed otherwise. We apologize for the miscommunication on this.

As for the billing error, yep, we certainly did send Stephen an invoice on January 28th. We failed to remove his account from the billing system before the next billing cycle. Stephen notified us of the error, and we corrected it immediately and again, apologized for the error.

To be honest SGHB I agree that express hosting and Tom (as I have seen others that use them post) has been exemplary in helping many forum owners with their boards.. Tom especially. I host my own stuff (but it is because I can and it is cheaper for me to do so). I understand though because we all

I'm going to echo SD's comments re: ExpressHosting. Tom was stellar in transferring my entire website, guestbook and UBBThreads to his servers. He set everything up and basically left me with nothing more to do. He also took care of Domain Name switch over too.

Performance is excellent on my shared service and far better than the VPS I had previously and with many more features. My initial skepticism of going from VPS to shared hosting was quickly removed in just a few days of experiencing the very noticeable difference.

So many complaints from members of the sites so slow or not working.Had nasty DNS problems for months, that I ended up paying a service from Romania to define, and when the fix came in it took too many days of "it will be fixed tomorrow" over something that should not have happened it the first place.

Double billed for 3 monthsNo back ups, even thought they 'confirmed' to me they did that.

Just fyiIt is still our responsibility to create our own backups.Most hosts will backup a server for catastrophic failures.But require us to make backups for our own use.Some hosts will restore a site for a fee or do it gratis.

But still it is best practice to make our own backups.

Blue Man GroupThere is no such thing as stupid questions. Just stupid answers

Yes the link on this site has been removed but they are at expresshosting.net.The primary contact is Tom Walsh.If you let him know you are using ubb that will help with the setup/transfer to the new server.

Blue Man GroupThere is no such thing as stupid questions. Just stupid answers

Yes the link on this site has been removed but they are at expresshosting.net.The primary contact is Tom Walsh.If you let him know you are using ubb that will help with the setup/transfer to the new server.